It won’t be another Doctor Who sermon, I promise, despite the obvious mission themes in last week’s series finale. I think one Doctor Who sermon a year is probably more than enough. But I do want to pause for a moment on those lurid, straight from a horror film elements of this gospel reading, because I think they shape the way we respond to its message. Think, for a moment, of your immediate response to one of the key phrases from this story: ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’. What does that conjure up in your mind? For some of you, I wager, it is an image of a nutter on a streetcorner, holding up a placard and menacing passers-by. Or of apocalyptic horror films, playing on our fears that the end of the world is nigh. For our culture, the phrase ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’, is not a statement, or a promise, but a threat: bad things are coming, and they are coming for you if you don’t conform.

I think there is an element of this gospel story and others like it in which the coming of the kingdom of God is a threat—the verses left out of today’s reading are a case in point, predicting dire woes for cities which have rejected Jesus’s good news. But while that part of the story has come to dominate our understanding of what it means to hear, or say, that the kingdom of God is at hand, in our gospel reading the threat of woe is only part of the story. When Jesus gives the seventy-two their marching orders, he starts with a small but significant command: ‘Behold I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.’ In the midst of all of the polarised, black and white apocalyptic imagery, it is easy to miss the strangeness of this verse, to hear ‘wolves’ and pass over the decidedly weird image of sheep going out on a mission. Have you ever tried to make a sheep do anything? It takes three people, or at least one very smart sheepdog. Jesus’s instructions in the next verses imply that these missionaries are to be intensely single-minded, taking no spare belongings and not even stopping to greet people in the road. But their single-mindedness is coupled with the opening instruction that the are to be sheep, soft animals who are none-too-bright, and generally the victims of power rather than wielders of it. These particular sheep may have an unusually strong sense of purpose, but they are not out to control, steal, damage, or manipulate, or any other wolfish crimes. In fact their mission is utterly simple, even daft. They are to announce peace, eat what is put in front of them, and care for the sick. Things, in fact, that anybody can do, and that don’t seem like a mission of great power. The coming of these particular messengers of the kingdom is hardly a threat. In fact, in most communities, they’d hardly even be noticed as they went about there sheepy business of eating and making people better.

What then, do we make of the fact that at the end of their sheepy visit they stop in the middle of the square and make that dire pronouncement, ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’? Even if we can set aside the end-of-the-world imagery, the announcement that the kingdom of God is coming is still not something we can ignore, not if we hear it properly as a message from Jesus. It is a statement that demands attention. A statement that demands a response. If we’re listening carefully, it is a statement that demands repentance. But not repentance as our society commonly imagines it—feeling bad about yourself, giving up sex and beer and anything else that makes you happy, and being good in the way that society understands as good but that isn’t necessarily good for you. Repentance in the gospels is something entirely different: a change of mind, a transformation of who you are, not into a clone of drab goodness, but into the most and best that you can be. For those people who have welcomed the sheep, accepted their peace and healing and offered hospitality in return, the announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand is not a threat of punishment, but a promise of the possibility of positive change. Of a world where the wolves don’t always triumph, and little acts of sharing food and offering care are rewarded. Of a world where you can be what God has made you to be. Of a world where God’s priorities rule.

It is a wondrous message, and it is our job to deliver it. We are the seventy-two, and we are commanded to take up this daunting mission: to go out as sheep, as the slow and the bumbling, whose only purpose is the journey, and whose only goals to take tea at the Avenue Club and care for our neighbours when they are in distress. And to tell them, with hope and courage and conviction, that the kingdom of God is at hand.

The Secretary of State for Education and Schools announced today that the department was considering reinstating segregated schools as new research confirmed that white students do not learn as quickly or retain information as well as their black schoolmates. The secretary was quoted as saying that ‘Separate schools are simply the best way to serve the differing needs of white pupils’.

The government delivered a white paper this morning that proposed that men should be required to take intelligence and personality tests before they were allowed to vote. ‘Science has demonstrated to us that men are more aggressive and more likely to act on impulse,’ said the Home Secretary in a radio interview. She added that the government was considering requiring women to take the tests too to demonstrate that it was not discriminating against any men who were capable of more reasoned decision-making.

Obviously those stories did not come from this week’s Times, or even the Guardian. And you would-I hope-be utterly appalled if I had reversed the roles in those stories, and reported a preference for segregating black pupils or forcing women to prove their fitness to vote. Those attitudes are, we like to tell ourselves, a thing of the past, or if they do survive now they are confined to a lunatic fringe.

But we have only to turn to two real news stories of this week to see that human beings, and the British in particular, still have some difficulties when it comes to figuring out how to live with one another as equals. A British company that imports fairtrade bananas, of all things, was revealed to be abusing and exploiting its largely Eastern European workforce. And the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has decided not to invite two US bishops to next summer’s Lambeth Conference. One of those bishops is gay. The other is a conservative evangelical who was installed over a group of dissident churches in Virginia by the Archbishop of Nigeria, who has now threatened to boycott the conference. Have you followed that? I don’t want to attempt to untangle the complicated politics of the Anglican communion, or even to comment on the hypocrisies that are possible in any corporation, even a fairtrade one. The point I wish to make is that human beings still, on the whole, have a pretty hard time untangling what it actually means to live with one another as equals. I might wholeheartedly believe that you are equal to me, and support your exercise of equal rights. But when it comes down to it, it is a lot easier for me to believe you are equal if you are pretty much like me, and if you don’t pose a threat to me in any way. If you challenge my safety or my economic security, or if heaven forbid you make me think again about what it means to be human, well then I might find it rather difficult to accept that your humanity is equal to mine.

Accepting that everyone, absolutely everyone, is equal under God, is what the feast of Pentecost is all about. Pentecost was, and still is, a major Jewish festival that celebrates the gift of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, to the Jewish people. In Jesus’s time Jews from all over the Near East gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate this important holiday. So the people gathered on that Pentecost morning to witness the coming of the Holy Spirit were from all over the known world, and the author of Acts is careful to list all of the different places they came from: Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Rome. They were all Jews, but they were divided by culture, politics and language, unable even to speak to one another. Many came from groups that wouldn’t have talked to one another even if they could. This was Babel all over again: humanity coming together, working together, yet somehow impossibly divided.

God chose that moment, when everything that unites and divides humanity was so clearly visible, to send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate that Jesus promised in the Gospel. And when the Spirit came, it appeared as tongues of fires. Luke uses that word not just because a flame looks a little bit like a tongue, but because this Spirit is literally bringing the gift of a fiery tongue, the ability to speak in other tongues, to proclaim God’s deeds of power in words that anyone and everyone can understand. The Holy Spirit crashes through the barriers of Babel in that moment, so that everyone can hear that message about God’s deeds of power.

And therein, I think, might lie the beginnings of an answer to our ongoing dilemma about how to begin to acknowledge that all human beings really are equal, and what that equality ought to mean for the decisions we make. The thing that unites those people gathered together in Jerusalem for Pentecost is not some message about human equality, or some insight into how the person next to me is just like me. God does not choose to have the Spirit work so that everyone present suddenly speaks the same language, or understands the Aramaic spoken by the disciples. No, each of us, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, each of us hears them speaking in our own language. What unites us in that moment is the chance to understand that message, in our own language, that message about God’s deeds of power. What unites us isn’t what was in us before we went into that square in Jerusalem. What unites us is the gift of the Holy Spirit, given to each of us, while we’re still speaking our own language and looking askance at our neighbours and wondering how to protect our own. In that moment God pours out the Spirit and, if we are lucky and brave, we may have a chance to see visions and dream dreams.

[The following paragraph was omitted from the sermon as preached.]

One of those who did see visions and dream dreams about human equality was the evolutionary biologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould. Dispatching his monthly column during a visit to South Africa in 1984, Gould penned an essay called ‘Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History’. Gould reflected that we ought to feel deeply thankful that biological evolution did not result in multiple species of humans, some clearly of lower intelligence and smaller brain capacity. It could easily have happened, since evolutionary history shows that multiple species of early hominids lived side by side for up to a million of years. ‘Equality’, Gould comments, ‘is not given a priori…. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn’t happen.’ Gould was writing from a scientific perspective, so for him the outcome of evolution, that human beings are biologically equal, was just a happy chance. But for us as Christians, the basic biological fact of human equality ought to be a reminder of God’s gracious blessing, of the gift of the Spirit that is indeed for all human beings in our manifold diversity, our many languages. The Spirit of the Lord is for everyone: young, old, male, female, slave, free, Parthians, Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians. British, Botswanan, and yes, even American. And the next time we find ourselves wondering what human equality might really mean, tempted to protect our own, make use of the gullible, or to withhold an invitation from someone who is different, perhaps we might remember that the answer to the dilemmas of human equality lies not in looking for what makes you like me, but in remembering that the Spirit of the Lord came to you as well as me, and in thanking God for that great deed of power.

Missourians would recognise Thomas’s stubborness. He is a kindred spirit, refusing to believe the evidence of all of his friends, refusing to believe in a miracle that his beloved leader Jesus himself had predicted, before it all went off the rails. Thomas wants proof, not just someone else’s testimony, even someone he trusts, but tangible proof, that he can stick his hands into. He wants to feel the truth with his own fingers.

Now, it’s quite common to say that Thomas has had a bad rap. After all, he was out of the room when Jesus made his miraculous appearance to all the other disciples and gave them the holy spirit. Maybe he was feeling a bit miffed at being left out. And the gospel story particularly tells us that the other disciples rejoiced to see Jesus only after he had shown them his hands and his side, those marks of his suffering, the very marks that Thomas demanded to see. They got to touch Jesus. They received the gift of the holy spirit. Maybe some part of Thomas doesn’t just want proof that Jesus has risen, but proof that he, Thomas, is still part of the fold, those select few who can reach out and touch Jesus.

Yes, I think Thomas probably gets a bad rap. He’s a convenient scapegoat for our own desire to see proof that God exists, and a convenient foil for our own frustration at the fact that Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, if they happened, were so very long ago. They got to touch Jesus. Even Thomas had a chance to touch him. Why can’t we?

Of course, in the most traditional readings of this passage, Thomas is a kind of straight man who sets up the punch line for Jesus, who uses the set-up to say something about faith. Crucially, the message isn’t for the disciples, who have seen Jesus before they believed. The message is for us us, John’s readers, who can now boast that we are really the blessed because we’ve believed what we cannot see. We are somehow even happier than the disciples. There are, obviously, several problems with that reading. It could make us rather smug in our blind faith, believing in a risen redeemer we’ve never seen. What sticks in the throat even more is the injustice that interpretation does to Thomas, who only wanted proof before he dared to believe that his beloved leader was alive. But the worst aspect of that reading is the harsh light in which it represents Jesus, who begins to look seriously unsympathetic to Thomas’s very human desires. Would Jesus really use one of his disciples just to make an example for the benefit of those who might one day hear the story?

If we look closely at the story, that isn’t what Jesus does. He doesn’t say to Thomas-as he had on Easter morning to Mary Magdalen-that he mustn’t touch. Jesus doesn’t decide that, having appeared to most of his disciples, he can leave Thomas out, or refuse to give him the proof that he longs for. No, Jesus gives Thomas the same moment that the other disciples have had, the same shock of joy at recognising Jesus and being reconciled to him. He may rebuke Thomas for not trusting a little more in his leader’s promise, not to mention in his friends, but even that rebuke is part of bringing him back into the fold. Jesus gives Thomas exactly what he needs, a chance to put his hands where Jesus was hurt and to feel that he is whole again.

But how does Jesus do that for us? How does he make us feel whole again? How does he respond when we demand, ‘show me’? After all, we will probably never get the chance in this life to touch Jesus and put our hands in his side. And if we shouldn’t be smug about believing when we haven’t seen, what comfort is left in this story? I think the comfort isn’t in what is said, but in the story itself, in the way Jesus responds to Thomas’s need to touch and see, and brings him gently back into the life of the disciples. God is infinitely patient with doubt, and doesn’t expect our faith to arise out of nothing. God knows that we need to be led along, to have proof of God’s love at crucial moments, our own chance to put our fingers in the marks of the nails and our hands in Jesus’ side. God knows that believing what you have not seen is not an easy thing.

But oh, is it worth it. Thomas’s response to Jesus’ attention is to cry out, ‘My Lord and my God’ – perhaps the most explicit acknowledgement of Jesus’ power and divinity in all of the gospels. Jesus’ care for Thomas yields a faith that is more complete than any other, a faith that embraces the power of life in Jesus’ name that is promised at the end of our gospel. This joyful eastertide, will you respond when God nudges at your faith, when God pays attention to what you need? Will you embrace life in his name?

Why are they scandalised? Well, as Judas points out, this is extremely expensive perfume—worth almost a year’s wages for a labourer. The gospel writer has the benefit of hindsight in pointing out that Judas was a thief who skimmed his bit off the top of the contributions to the poor, but surely the people sitting at the dinner table that night must have nodded their heads in agreement that so much money could have been put to better use. And the woman hasn’t even got it right. Traditionally, perfume and oils were used to anoint the head, as they are in the other versions of this story. But Mary pours this monstrously expensive pistachio-scented perfume on Jesus’ feet—which, if you think about it, is decidedly weird. No matter how diligently she wiped with her hair—not the most absorbent material at the best of times—Jesus’ feet would have ended up sticky. Even if he was now spotlessly clean and smelled heavenly, when he put on his sandals and went out into the street he was going to end up with a pistachio-scented dirt paste on his feet.

           This is a fabulously pointless, wonderfully extravagant gesture. Mary has poured out her love with the perfume, and it is perhaps impossible to say which is more priceless. While she may have rather poor aim, she can’t be faulted for having grasped what is most important about the situation: Jesus is here, now, and we must love him while we’ve got him.

Human beings aren’t, generally, very good at such extravagant gestures. I think it is notable in our story that the men are all reclining at table, perhaps rather chuffed to be there with Jesus and the now equally famous Lazarus who had been resurrected from the dead. They seem to be in awe of Jesus, or perhaps they want something from him. Power, wisdom, a dip in the money box, the chance to see God. But the women respond by serving, in the best way that they know how, giving back to Jesus as much as they can. It isn’t that they don’t want something, too, but rather that they know they’ve already got it: Jesus, here, with us now.

Women in these gospel stories are usually rather clearer-sighted about Jesus than the men—it’s something that theologians have noticed for centuries. But most of us, unfortunately, are rather more like the slow blokes. We’re not quite ready to commit ourselves. We wait to see how our lives might change, what reclining at the dinner table with Jesus might be like. We’re reluctant to wait at table in case this Christianity thing isn’t really worth debasing ourselves for. We worry about the value of the perfume, and how the money might best be spent.

Take the story about John Newton, one-time slave trader, later author of Amazing Grace. Churches up and down the land today have been asked to sing that song, because of its connection with the anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade. But the story is not so simple. John Newton did experience a dramatic conversion to Christianity in the middle of a storm on a slave ship in 1748. But he went on working on slave ships for another six years, and in related industries for a further ten. He wrote the stunningly simple words to Amazing Grace to accompany a sermon he preached in 1772. But it wasn’t until 1785, thirty-seven years after his conversion, that Newton, together with the young William Wilberforce, became involved in the campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Now, I don’t wish to denigrate Newton’s achievements. On the contrary, I think he was rather human in his response to Christ’s call. His conversion on a slave-ship filling with water and the writing of Amazing Grace have been conflated in popular memory to an extravagant gesture rather like Mary’s anointing of Jesus in our gospel story. But in fact his response was a slow one. He took many years to understand the gospel, and in later life said of his own conversion story that he wasn’t really a believer, in the full sense of the word, till “a considerable time after” that stormy night. In 1748 anti-slavery was still in its infancy, and many Christians and Christian churches participated in and benefited from slavery and the slave trade. The Church of England and USPG both owned plantations in the Caribbean that used slave labour. Newton’s slow realisation that his life as a slave trader was wrong is a very human gesture, and a brave one in its own way.

Amazing Grace is not, then, a hymn that has much, if anything, to do with slavery or the abolition of the slave trade. But it is a hymn about extravagant gestures. If Newton’s response to God’s love was slow and measured, this hymn suggests that he did ultimately realise that God’s love itself was never slow nor measured, but was in fact the most extravagant gesture of them all.

Amazing Grace! how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I am found;

was blind, but now I see.

Grace, as many of you know, means undeserved love: the most extraordinary, extravagant gesture there is. Isaiah characterises it as making a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert—doing the things that no human being can do, and making harsh nature a verdant, hospitable place. As Paul puts it, the miracle is that while we were still sinners, Jesus Christ died for us. God’s saving love finds us on the slave ship, and follows us even when we’re not quite ready to leave the slave ship behind. Newton must have known this. Amazing Grace is his own, belated extravagant gesture in response to that amazing love.

It is this extravagant love that we celebrate as we bring Rosie for baptism today. Now, I can’t ask any of you to think about what sort of extravagant gesture you might make in response to God’s love for Rosie, or God’s love for yourself. Extravagant gestures can’t really be thought out in advance. What I can perhaps ask you to do is not to think so hard the next time you are tempted to make an extravagant gesture of love. Dare to serve someone, to take someone in or to make yourself vulnerable. Dare to be a disciple, and with John Newton to face the true slowness of your own conversion. Dare to break that jar of expensive perfume. Your aim may be no better than Mary’s, but you will nevertheless have had the courage to reach out for the transforming love offered to you in Christ Jesus.

How do we pray? 

The Book of Common Prayer includes no directions for private prayers.

Primers of the time supplied prayers that accompanied the service and prayers for specific circumstances, both daily (before and after meals) and occasional (before childbirth, before death, etc)

Prayer was seen as properly all communication between the heart and God, but the reformers had a tendency to see prayer primarily in terms of intercession (what I want from God) and vows (what I’ll do for God), secondarily thanksgiving and adoration (how I respond to God):

By prayer and supplication we pour out our desires before God, asking as well those things which tend to promote his glory and display his name, as the benefits which contribute to our advantage. By thanksgiving we duly celebrate his kindnesses toward us, ascribing to his liberality every blessing which enters into our lot. David accordingly includes both in one sentence, “Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me,” (Ps. 50:15). Scripture, not without reason, commands us to use both continually. (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.2.28)

Prayer (for the early English reformers) was thus primarily about an exchange relationship. Meditation/devotion were not strongly encouraged beyond self-examination/penitence.

Primers/set prayers were not particularly artful or satisfactory, so poets (among others) began to step in to demonstrate how prayer could be performed and also to encourage or stimulate devotion. 

Most poets were silently influenced by a revival of meditation that drew on late-medieval and counter-Reformation forms of meditation, particularly Jesuit forms.

But the question remained of how best to teach, model or inspire prayer.

Devotion through the image 

Visual art can teach us some of the primary methods artists can inspire prayer.

Icons. The image of the object of devotion looks directly at the viewer. The viewer is invited to engage in devotion through contemplation of the image. Interaction with the image itself. Encourages posture of humility.

Devotion through imitation

Renaissance art. Image of object of devotion often doesn’t look at the viewer. Other figures usually present to model correct postures (sometimes multiple postures – adoration, humility, lamentation etc). One is expected to learn devotion from these paintings, not use them as mediators for devotion. The paintings encourage a posture of careful examination – humility or prayerfulness comes later. 

Poetry: Devotion through imitation

The Daughters of Jerusalem 

Thrice happy women that obtaind such grace
From him whose worth the world could not containe;Immediately to turne about his face,
As not remembring his great griefe and paine,
To comfort you, whose teares powr’d forth apace
On Flora’s bankes, like shewers of Aprils raine:
    Your cries inforced mercie, grace, and love
    From him, whom greatest Princes could not moove:  To speake on word, nor once to lift his eyes
Unto proud Pilate, no nor Herod, king;
By all the Questions that they could devise,
Could make him answere to no manner of thing;
Yet these poore women, by their pitious cries
Did moove their Lord, their Lover, and their King,
    To take compassion, turne about, and speake
    To them whose hearts were ready now to breake.  Most blessed daughters of Jerusalem,
Who found such favour in your Saviors sight,
To turne his face when you did pitie him;
Your tearefull eyes, beheld his eies more bright;
Your Faith and Love unto such grace did clime,
To have reflection from this Heav’nly Light:
    Your Eagles eyes did gaze against this Sunne,
    Your hearts did thinke, he dead, the world were done.
  When spightfull men with torments did oppresse
Th’afflicted body of this innocent Dove,
Poore women seeing how much they did transgresse,
By teares, by sighes, by cries intreat, nay° prove,
What may be done among the thickest presse,
They labour still these tyrants hearts to move;
    In pitie and compassion to forbeare
    Their whipping, spurning, tearing of his haire.

Aemilia Lanyer, in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 

Poetry: Meditation models

Poetry can do something visual art cannot – can take the reader through the stages of devotion experienced by the poet.

Much poetry follows models of Jesuit meditation: preparatory prayer, composition of place (the intense imagining of a Biblical scene that we normally think of as Jesuit meditation), asking God to fulfil the aim of the meditation, meditation proper (contemplation of the subject, properly set up in the ‘composition of place), colloquies in which one spontaneously responds to God. 

Poetry as Meditation

Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward 

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being, by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesses so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstools crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once, peirc’d with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his appare’l, rag’d, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They’are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face. John Donne 

Easter

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise

Without delayes,

Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise

With him mayst rise:

That, as his death calcined¹ thee to dust,

His life may make thee gold, and much more, just. 

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part

With all thy art.

The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,

Who bore the same.

His stretched sinews taught all strings,

what keys best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song

Pleasant and long:

Or, since all musick is but three parts vied

And multiplied,

O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,

And make up our defects with his sweet art 

I got me flowers to straw thy way;

I got me boughs off many a tree:

But thou wast up by break of day,

And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sunne arising in the East,

Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;

If they should offer to contest

With thy arising, they presume. 

Can there be any day but this,

Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we misse:

There is but one, and that one ever. 

George Herbert 

Poetry as Prayer Prayer: intercession or meditation?
Reading poetry to stimulate meditation – take note of how the poem is trying to teach you to pray (of course not all religious poetry is about prayer). What should be your posture before this poem?

Writing poetry as prayer – take time to prepare yourself, set the scene. Not necessary to jump in and speak to God directly if you are not prepared/inspired.

Editing and re-writing can be part of the devotional process, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Poetry as Prayer Powerpoint

Gospel commentators have struggled with this question for centuries. It is a recurring theme in the gospel of Mark, and there are several theories as to what it might mean. I don’t want to consider any of them tonight, but merely to suggest that the balance between cautious silence and zealous speaking in this story might contain a message about how we are to be as Christians. This is, after all, a story about the opening of a man’s ears and the unbinding of his tongue. Perhaps, as Christians, we ought to pause at moments like this, at the miracles and mystery of Jesus’s life. Perhaps we ought to allow our ears and our hearts to work for a while before we open our mouths. Eventually, after we have looked and listened for a while, we might want to nudge each other, as Rowan Williams puts it, as say, “Look at that! Look at Jesus.” And finally, we might be ready for zealous proclamation, for telling the world what we have seen.

But then, you may have something you want to nudge me about.

The issue of how we understand Jesus as king therefore seems like a very modern one, a symptom of our changing society. And it is probably true that 65 years ago, when the current queen was driving an ambulance in service to her country, ministers didn’t find it so difficult to preach on Christ the King Sunday. In the times of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, images of Christ as king provided ripe fodder for royal chaplains who wanted to flatter Elizabeth, James or Charles into thinking they were God’s deputy on earth. And they found plenty of material to feed that monarchical arrogance. But they would not have been able to use today’s gospel reading for those flattering sermons. Today’s reading very starkly reminds us that Jesus is not a king as we know it, and in fact has never been. In a time when kingship and despotic rule were the norm, Jesus states loudly and clearly that his kingdom is out of this world. His kingdom does not establish itself through violence. It is not concerned with self-promotion but with the declaration of the truth. Human history, he implies, has never known a king like Jesus. A king who will die for the life of his people, not in some battle for territory, but in a sacrifice for their souls.

So it is not only our preference for democracy, or even our cynicism about power, that makes it difficult for us to understand what Jesus means when he talks about himself as king. Understanding Jesus as King has always required a feat of imagination, even from the very beginning. We’re just not equipped as human beings to trust that someone as powerful as Jesus could also be as loving and merciful. We know that power corrupts, and that human beings are not very good at being peaceful with one another. We so often fail to deal with our own conflicts without resorting to violence, as the ironies of military campaigns with names like Operation Enduring Freedom continually emphasise. We can’t seem to sort ourselves out without some people lording it over others, and even when we try to set people free the result is often bungled violence. The idea that Jesus might be a different sort of king, an ideal sort of king, who could have all power but somehow still leave us free to be ourselves, and love us as we are, and forgive us when we fail, well, that idea is often just beyond us.

Our reading from Revelation illustrates pretty graphically how difficult it is to imagine this King Jesus. Revelation is full of ripe images that are often impossible to depict. A king who stands in a circle of lamps, holding seven stars in his hand and with a flaming sword coming out of his mouth. A lamb, standing triumphant, but looking as if it had been slain. And in today’s passage, we have the one coming with the clouds…what does that mean? The firstborn of the dead—how do you do that one in stained glass? These images an attempt to show the Jesus is who almost beyond our imagination, the Jesus who is more true and pure, more powerful and more loving, than anything we have ever encountered, or can ever encounter.

I think this feat of imagination is one of the most difficult parts about being a Christian. Every day we encounter people and events that encourage us to make God smaller, to fit God into our human boxes that we can understand. To downplay the suffering of the crucifixion because we are uncomfortable with violence. To distance God from real action in our lives, diminish his healing and forgiving and saving power, because we can’t imagine a way in which it doesn’t threaten our autonomy, or in which losing our autonomy would in fact be part of the blessing. We make God into our own image, instead of remembering that we are made in God’s image.

This morning we are celebrating the baptism and new life of another made in God’s image, Ella Palmer, and as her parents and godparents and the church that is welcoming her into its life, we have a duty to aid her in this feat of imagination. The part of the service in which Peter will “commission” the parents and godparents to bring up Ella as a good Christian sounds daunting, but in fact it is missing something because it does not mention this most vital task of being brave enough to imagine God as bigger than ourselves. Ella’s parents and godparents may be successful in bringing her to church and eventually to confirmation, in guiding and protecting her, but they will only succeed in their duty to bring her up as a child of God if they can give her the gift of courageous imagination. How different could our lives be if we could imagine a world in which Operation Iraqi freedom was itself unimaginable? How might God use us, poor, obscure, plain and little as we are, in this brave new world? As we rejoice in Ella’s new life, and as we all go forward into the preparation time of Advent, our challenge is to imagine not only an unimaginable King Jesus, but ourselves as his subjects. As the lovely Iona hymn puts it, we are blessed beyond imagination to have a Saviour without safety,a tradesman without tools[who] has come to tip the balancewith fishermen and fools.

           Our translation perhaps makes that strangeness a little more apparent: the valleys are no longer exalted, but filled in. The mountains and hills are made low, and the crooked (crooked what? I wonder) are made straight, and the rough paths smooth. These images are a graphic illustration of the command of the previous verse: “make his paths straight”. Literally everything that is in the way: mountains, valleys, bends in the road, must be pushed through, made straight and level, so that God will have a clear path.           

Now I don’t think it is just the fault of Handel’s Messiah that I’ve never really seen these images for what they are. I think it is probably something in me, and perhaps something in modern culture, that doesn’t really like the idea of making everything straight and level. Perhaps it is because we don’t live in an inhospitable desert where cliffs and ravines present real obstacles to daily living: our mountains and valleys are mainly picturesque places to indulge in a little recreational walking. Straight places are boring, and more than a little intimidating: if you’ve ever been to the American midwest you’ll know what I mean. Standing in the middle of a North Dakota cornfield, it feels as if the green tassels must go on forever, as if everything is very vast and I am very small. I think we feel the same about our human lives. We have come to see the bumps and obstacles of everyday existence as part of the essential texture of human life, and we are more than a little frightened of the vast, lonely potential of a straight and clear existence.

            Now, I don’t think an acceptance of the bumpiness of human life is on the whole a bad thing. It is certainly important that we are compassionate about the bumps in others lives. But I do think that today’s reading is reminding us that we can perhaps come to cherish the bumpiness in our own lives a little too much, so that we no longer value or hope for the straightness and clarity that we could have in a life with God. As we learn to accept and understand our human weakness, we can perhaps become a little too friendly with it, a little too cherishing of the bumps and valleys in our own lives and in that of our community. Just think of how our culture values “quirkiness” – what is it that makes you a little crooked, a little not straight? It is all too easy to slide from accepting one another’s differences to treasuring our own faults, to ignoring that some of what makes us quirky may also make us hurtful or forgetful of others.

            Advent is the time to change all of that. It is the time a preparing for the coming of God, and so for facing up to faults, not so that we love them (in ourselves, at least) but so that we can try to correct them. It is a time to ask ourselves: What are the hills and valleys inside me? What can I do to make straight the way of the Lord? When I’m hiding behind my quirkiness, is God trying to reach me from behind a corner? And of course it isn’t just our own personal faults that need facing. As we look forward to receiving our audit report and thinking and talking about what we could be as a church, we should be asking the same questions of our community that this gospel encourages us to ask of ourselves. What are the hills and valleys of our church community? What can we do to make straight the way of the Lord to our own hearts, but also to those of the community that we serve?

            It may be easy for me to list all of those questions, but in fact this is all very hard work, or at least it should be. For all of the exuberance of Handel’s Messiah, this passage is not primarily about the exalted glory of God, but about a call to repentance, literally a change of mind. Filling in valleys and making mountains low should take a lot of steady, gruelling effort. We need to work hard indeed to make our souls places that are clear of obstacles to God.

            But for all of the hard work entailed, Handel’s exuberance is not misplaced. There is joy in this passage: the joy that we are commanded to make straight the paths of the Lord not so that the Lord can go somewhere, out there, but so that the Lord can come right here, to us. God in us. God with us. Emmanuel. God wants to be with us, to make us whole and show us God’s salvation, so much so that God will tear down every barrier to get to our hearts. If we are brave enough to take on this gospel challenge, we are promised the greatest reward of all.

I would like to close by playing the aria from the Messiah, and inviting you to meditate on the challenge it presents to you, in your own life, and to the life of our community. Prepare ye the way of the Lord!